This year more than ever before the Wimbledon web experience is much more what us Web 2.0 geekanisters would like to see. Letting people experience Wimbledon wherever they happen to be. I am not just talking about the Second Life presence
This widget is another prime example, able to be embedded and posted all over the place, facebook, blogs etc. It is also personalized to the user, the players they choose to follow. Its been a quiet revolution for a website that got 266,311,332 page views last year over the event, but one that I am very happy to see.
So props to Stephen Hammer and the Atlanta sports event crew for putting this widget together. You have the next 7 days to enjoy its live features.
Category Archives: Events
Real Life Wimbledon still Rezzing
Wimbledon is building a new court number 2. I got to go and have a look. The whole place is currently plain concrete and also has some terracotta warrior style statues of the players. All in all it looks like a Second Life render of a place that has not had any textures applied yet. (It was Ricky that pointed this out first yesterday to me and so I had to go and see, and he is right I think)
The avatars of the players ar in the video below, along with a nice particle effect (they were watering the real grass with real water and getting a real rainbow)
Replacement video as the other one was incorrectly identified as copyright infringement. Still doing the paperwork to clear my good name
Some of the faces behind eightbar
There are some notable absences from this video that quickly zooms around some of the people behind eightbar and its extended family. They are by no means all virtual world people, but there is a healthy coverage and interest along with all things web2.0
Just a shout out to the band really as we were saying goodbye to Alice (well sort of goodbye as she is back on Extreme Blue as a student contributor on monday)
If you click through to youtube you will get something annotated using the new youtube annotation feature.
I dont want to get too gushy, but you guys rock 🙂 (as do those who could not be in the pub that night)
Wimbledon 08 in Second Life, the build progresses
With Wimbledon looming large and already qualifying starting this week you may think we are leaving it a little late to complete the build and presence in Second Life. In many ways you would be right. However, we are all giving it some time, knowing full well that we will also build during the event. It has been interesting to see what has happened to some of our scripts, in particular the tennis ball rendering with all the various updates. The base scripts done by Pipe Hesse are still htere, were still active, but seemed to have been damaged a little by the many upgrades that have occured. We are still unsure about representing the ball flow again this year, for various reasons as I alluded to in the previous post around web page on a prim. For me the complications and social interactions that can happen around collaborative web browsing this year are the key part.
In jointly building this with Andy Remblai, Judge Hocho and Laronzo Fitzgerald we have given ourselves a platform to try some things. I am accutely aware that it will be my stage for 2 weeks too and that being live in world for the event will be as big a challenge as last year, if not more so. Of course if nobody comes to visit next week that too will be a challenge, but I hope that will not be the case. Avatar fingers are crossed as we are 5 days from live (though live is a time for continuous development not a traditional hard stop, this is a virtual world and this a dynamic build environment after all.
Rockets in action and I don’t mean salad leaves
On friday a contingent of the Hursley Emerging tech crew (a good few of who are founder members of eightbar) gathered in a Hampshire field to have a rocket launching competition. Fellow eightbar Rob Smart has produced this video of the entire event, its features all the key moments including Dave CJ’s rocket complete with wireless camera to record the flight, and landing (in a tree).
All the rockets were non-explosive, water powered, diet coke powered etc. It was a very good work day out and bonding experience, with a huge dose of geek chic on top of it. There was lots of participation too.
We did this last about 3 years ago, then I remember about 4 cameras. This time it was very well covered in digital form. We have a growing flickr pool if you are interested.
Augmented Reality N95 style – hackday tea
We had a Hackday in IBM today, it was the 5th year of having a day when people just find a project and blitz it for a day.
The aim is not always completion, but starting and sharing.
I decided to try a proof of concept around augmented reality on my N95 using Python.
Here is a screen shot of something that I counted as a result. The next steps are to allow for greater movement in the heads up display. I needed these first steps of overlaying data first though
I have to say I was quite pleased for a few hours mashing and hacking and a few hours prep.
We won an IBM Baffler for eightbar
In a prestigous awards ceremony held in Hursley this afternoon the results of the IBM wide voting in various categories for blogs and social media were announced. Eightbar won the category of “Best IBM related external blog”. Props go to James Taylor for getting this whole thing going, but most of all thanks to all who voted.
We should also thank all our other readers not in IBM who have taken an interest in what we have had to say over the years on eightbar, in particular the whole metaverse/secondlife/virtual worlds crews out there. (…Insert any suitable gushing oscar acceptence speech in here that is your personal favourite)
What do we win for this then? Well as its by the people for the people its really the prestige and knowing that a whole host of collegues have appreciated what we have been going on about and the way we have gone about it.
To mark the win we are getting a share of some fantastic Moo Stickers (You can tell our fellow eightbar Andy Piper (sometimes Moo salesman and evangelist has been involved too)). Also special thanks go to Daz as he is the one paying for the hosting and doing the sys admin on all this too.
I still keep telling people Web 2 is Web Do, you have to just have a go and see where these things take you.
Summary of social networks panel at VW08
I moderated a panel on virtual worlds, games and social networks at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference today. I recently put out a request for questions here on Eightbar, and got a great response. Here are my (very poor and woefully incomplete) recollections of the event. I’m hoping to get a copy of the audio from the event organizers, which will help me flesh this out For now…
My three co-panelists introduced themselves- Christian Lassonde – President & Co Founder, Millions of Us
- Susan Panico – Senior Director, Playstation Network, Sony
- Sean Ryan – CEO, Meez
Susan described the attraction of worlds created “for gamers by gamers” so I pressed her on whether Home is going to include user generated content. (When Corey Bridges spoke at SXSW, he mentioned that in the late 90s, if you’d asked people who will be the biggest content producers on the web, people might have guessed ‘Disney’, or other big entertainment brands, and that this turns out not to have been the case. In quite a big way. The creators of the web are everyday people. Does the mentality of user-generated content have any space in the world of Home? (I also mentioned, in a hat-tip to timdp’s question that she should explain it in terms of what will make Home ‘sticky and compulsive’). Susan conceded that while the experiences would be participatory and social, the content is not going to be user-generated. Christian later revealed that Millions of Us are working with Sony on Home (which was new news to me!)
I asked a very summary version of David Orban’s question (I probably didn’t do it justice, but I pointed out that virtual worlds and games are generally synchronous and realtime, while web based social networks are largely asynchronous. What implications does this have for the future of virtual worlds and social networks?) Everyone agreed that social networks are generally asynchronous, and games are generally synchronous, and all predicated that virtual worlds were bound to become more like social networks in the future. Giff Constable ask a question to clarify that synchronous things don’t tend to happen in asynchronous spaces (not currently many examples of this in existing social networks) but hinted that increased presence information (“currently online”) might gradually augment what we see now (replay, ghost data to simulate synchronous activity in an asynchronous space). I should have pushed harder on this point, because there was a big gap between where everyone agreed we are now and where they all agreed we would obviously end up. I asked about walled gardens.(My friend kybernetikos wanted me to ask this question: Walled gardens have failed (spectacularly and famously) on the web. Yet people are making walled gardens in the fields of games, social networks AND virtual worlds?)
Christian said that he didn’t expect this to chance in the near future (though mentioned that perhaps in the long term things may be more open). In the short term, he described a business reality in which people have no incentive to help people migrate into a competitive. Question from the audience re virtual worlds for learning and education.
Both Sean and Christian agreed with each other that education was not a big sector at the moment. I chipped in with the point that education and business are not mutually exclusive, and that there are lots of ongoing projects with education and training for business. Question from the audience about networks which extend beyond one world/game, in which you register your avatar/user for multiple social spaces and share reputation and status in multiple places (including Myrl.com).
Christian pointed out that these had been around for a while, and most have fallen away. Final question from the audience on where is this stuff going in 5 years.
Christian says 5 years is particularly hard (1 year is easy. 50/100 years isn’t too bad. 5 years, someone will hold you to it.)
Pretty much consensus from the panel that virtual worlds are going to be big. Maybe we won’t talk about social networks and virtual worlds as separate things. I predicted that 2D content will still be around for a very long time (in addition to much more ubiquitous 3D stuff where it makes sense), and also mentioning that I’d been surprised not to see more Augmented Reality at this conference and to look out for it in the next few years.
VWF pre-conference workshop
Both Ian and I are (for once) in the same place for much of this week at the Virtual Worlds Forum conference. I’m actually speaking at the ‘harnessing enterprise virtual worlds‘ pre-event workshop today, as part of the following lineup:
- Steve Prentice (Gartner) – What are enterprise virtual worlds?
- Ron Edwards (Ambient Performance) – Harnessing the advantages of enterprise virtual worlds
- Dele Atanda (Diageo) – Case study (their work in Second Life with Rivers Run Red and IBM)
- Roo Reynolds (IBM) – Building a community within a (big) company
- Chris ‘Satchmo Prototype’ Carella (Electric Sheep Company) – Understanding the human factor
- Sara De Freitas (Serious Games Institute) – The impact on education
Here are my slides. I’ll try to add the audio track later today. You might want to open the presentation itself and click the “comments on slide x” tab to see the speaker notes.
A nice warmup for the conference and it was really good to meet Chris/Satchmo face-to-face for the first time.
IBM, Virtual Worlds and Standards – a roundup
Although I’m missing the conference in San Jose this week, I am watching the breaking news from the event with rabid interest. First, we have the news itself. There was the official IBM release of course, and it hit the official Linden Lab blog too.
“Linden Lab and IBM will collaborate on integrating virtual worlds and the current Web, improving the stability of the platform, increasing interoperability, securing transactions, and bringing us closer to the creation of universal avatars.”
Next, there are the people reporting the news. The organisers of the current conference in San Jose covered the story on their blog, pointing out the highlights, which are:
- Universal Avatars
- Security-rich Transactions
- Platform stability
- Integration with existing Web and business processes
- Open standards for interoperability with the current Web
The Reuters story (carried by a huge number of news sources) also had summary and quotes from Colin Parris (the VP in charge of this stuff at IBM)…
An open system would let people create one avatar that would keep the same basic appearance and customer data no matter where it was in cyberspace.
“It is going to happen anyway,” said Colin Parris, IBM vice president of digital convergence. “If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that’s open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible.”
Now, we have the analysis, which gets really interesting. Read/Write Web asks “Is the move towards interoperability a meaningful announcement and what kind of future could it lead to?, inviting Wagner James Au, Barb Dybwad and Eric Rice to share their thoughts.
On the more tongue-in-cheek side, Nicholas Carr asks “Can I bring my flame thrower into Second Life?” predicting that “About five minutes after the gates come down, all the residents of Second Life will have been made the slaves of powerful Warcraft clans.” which is hilarious, but perhaps intentionally misses the point slightly.
“Don’t lose sleep over this in your excitement, boys and girls. It will take a little while to arrive. The point is that this is now out in the open, following months of speculation – and the parties involved go beyond just IBM and Linden Lab. I understand that at least 20 companies were represented at last night’s meeting”
Which is a really good point. This is far bigger than just an IBM + Linden Lab announcement; the discussions and announcements happening at the conference are rather larger and more exciting even than that. And just as well too, because Bobbie Johnson at the Guardian Unlimited rather hits the nail on the head:
“I don’t really want my avatar to move between a series of closed virtual environments: I want a single, linked virtual environment that I can move around freely.”
And that’s exactly where we need to take this goal of interoperability and standards in virtual worlds. A nod towards standards is not enough. To allow virtual worlds to inter-operate will require the whole industry (including initiatives like the Metaverse Roadmap and the Architecture Standards Working Group to name a couple) to help in building partnerships, agreements and standards.